UNEC (CAMPUS) CHAPTER (2ND AND 3RD YEAR)

2ND YEAR AT THE UNIVERSITY OF NIGERIA ENUGU CAMPUS (UNEC)

Family

University of Nigerian Medical Students' Association (UNMSA) 

Joining FMASA; My experience at SCOMER Scientific Research Writing and Publication Training  

How it started:

How it is going:

Introducing my favourite Guest speakers friends and mentor ✌

 Becoming the First Organising Sectary of FAMSA-UNMSA Standing Committee on Publications, Enugu Chapter__ what it is like.

Anybody can be a writer; you can weave reality, thoughts, emotions- just about anything- into words. We wish to place that ink that flourishes and treads where others wouldn’t under limelight; join us to stir changes in the world with the mind and words.

 FAMSA SCOPUB UNMSA is on a mission to inspire and promote substantial knowledge and skills in research. See what we do

I am privileged to have engaged in multiple projects as the first Organising Seectary of FAMSA Standing Committee on Publications, a few of the being the Research Webinar that featured a renowned figure in the medical research and writing community, Abdulhammed Babatudne.

New knowledge and advancement in already established knowledge are all born of research.

Therefore FAMSA-SCOPUB(UNMSA) invites you to her virtual Research Webinar to equip you with the necessary skills to carry out successful research.

Guest speaker: Abdulhammed Babatunde, the Chairperson of FAMSA-SCOMER, who is a seasoned researcher and has 15 research publications in international peer-reviewed journals and presented abstracts in international conferences.

Moderator: Mokwe Victor, FAMSA-SCOPUB(UNMSA) Organizing Secretary-2022.

Date: Wednesday, 21st September 2022

Time: 5:00pm GMT+1

Yet another and my favorite of them all was inviting our guest speaker and a dear friend in the person of God'swill Dickson to take us down his lane of becoming a phenomenal writer and through the journey of becoming one ourselves.

 Meet our speaker for the FAMSA SCOPUB Training in Writing and Publications .

 _God'swill Dickson_ is the Vice President of the renowned University of Nigeria Essayist Group (UNEG).

Date: 27th June 2022
Time: 5:00 pm GMT +1
Venue: Telegram


 Moderator of the Session: _Orji Isaac_

 Please bring along your excitement, curiosity and questions. We have a treat for each of them, and everyone-- beginners, mediocre or experts, nonetheless.

Take advantage of this learning opportunity and expand your knowledge, experience and skill set (good things don't come around this free you know, so why not drink directly from the rich fountain while you can)
SEE YOU ON THE OTHER SIDE!

 Signed :
 _Mokwe Victor_
 FAMSA-SCOPUB Organising Secetary-2022

For:
Dr Johua Aluga Gideon
 FAMSA SCOPUB Chairperson-2022

Joining NIMSA; The Standing Committee on Medical Education, Enugu Chapter

How it started:

How it is going:

First mission (project):

Second Mission (Project):

In line with SCOME activities 2022, SCOME UNMSA will be embarking on a special secondary school outreach tagged “MeducationNg”

This outreach will entail talks on:
-Introduction to SCOME
-Medical Education
-Health Awareness & Drug Abuse
-Mentorship talk

In addition to this, Over 140+ SCOME branded excercise books will be shared to the students were
reaching out to

"Are you sure you want to become a doctor?"

I want to echo this question to the hearing of whoever that wishes to pursue a career path in Medicine. In my opinion, becoming a doctor who is consciously and continuously equipping himself with the knowledge and skills to equal the unending and dynamic health crises that threaten lives in society is better said than done nowadays. It is certainly not a job for the weak. It is a job for the strongest of hearts, minds, and spirits; a job for those that feel like they can carry the weight of the world on their shoulders or conquer it entirely. 

Third Mission: Joining the National SCOME Research team to publish the 2022 NIMSA Magazine on Medical Education. Can you site me in the publication team?

Here's our making; isn't she beautiful?

Don't hesitate to click on the front cover below and enjoy its content. Have fun!

Treatise on the 2022 ASUU Strike 

Two years after the nine-month-long 2020 strike by the Academic Staff Union of Universities and sadly this is still the norm:  

... A good example of the resource curse currently playing out in Nigeria is the ASUU and Federal

Government conflict over the funding of the educational sector.

ASUU (Academic Staff Union of Universities) is a trade union popular to every student in public

Nigerian Federal universities because it represents and protects the interests of its members by ensuring

educational development in Nigerian universities and majorly because of the perennial industrial strikes actions, dating back to 1999, that have been used to persuade cooperation of the Nigerian

government in the revitalization of the nation’s educational sector.

The whooping population of 1.2 million students (Statistica, 2019) in federal universities in

Nigeria are currently at home over conflicts of the importance of Nigeria education in the

country; talk more about the salaries of lecturers, the miserly salaries of ASUU members in the face of spiral inflation over the years, the decayed infrastructures, the lack of equipment and facilities in universities, According to ASUU, there will be no resumption in public universities until the renegotiated 2009 agreement is implemented and the University Transparency and Accountability Solution (UTAS) platform is deployed. The government is owing its members 12 years of earned academic allowances and they have been 13 years on an old salary; meanwhile, political appointees and elected people in government enjoy the periodic review of their allowances and salaries. The 2009 agreement stipulates the welfare package for lecturers, their entitlements, and how their salaries should be reviewed from time to time, among others. Their salaries are just too poor yet the Federal Government owes them earned allowances... (You can get the rest in the document attached below).

POOR REMUNERATION OF LECTURERS IN NIGERIA: EFFECTS ON STUDENTS’ ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE

How I made most of the Strike 

• Teaching! I know now why it is one of the noblest professions in society. As a part-time teacher at Universal Model Secondary School Aba, I was able to teach young students in secondary school to see education for what it is, a weapon and instrument of change and empowerment. I believe education is an avenue for us to discover and amass essential knowledge and prowess, and apply them in solving societal problems. It is a call for us to take part in the movement to correct societal errs,  invent, and secure an innovative and progressive society. It is a call for us to be changemakers, leaders, problem solvers and activists of positive change. Teaching during the 2022 9-month-long Universities strike was my buffer against the sheer depression many students faced. Many would think it an irony to be teaching while I am being denied education myself, but I genuinely wanted to teach to remind myself of my identity and inspire the same in the students. 

• Becoming a Global Citizen Year Fellow to conserve my purpose, my people, and my power and calling to build a world that is just, inclusive, equitable and sustainable than what is today.If I could rewind time I would do the same, or more; Place myself at the centre of a diverse cohort of amazingly motivated young people around the world, a network of mentors, influential and impactful leaders, and international icons across industries and political and social sectors. Apply and join us if you can. It is a rewarding experience.

How it started at:

 How it is going:

GLOBAL CITIZEN YEAR ACADEMY

SOCIAL IMPACT PROPOSAL

BY

CHUKWUEMEKA VICTOR MOKWE

28TH NOVEMBER 2022

OVERVIEW:

Title: The People’s Resolution; Promoting Enlightenment and Health Resolution in my Community.

Overview:

My GCYA proposal is written as a nonfiction where I (Victor) am the centre character situated in my community and actively navigating through the problems behind the title ‘Promoting Enlightenment and Health Resolution in my Community’’ I wish to solve. My choice of a non-fiction format was to ensure the message and mission of my social impact proposal is driven home. The requirement to divide the proposal paper into different section headings: Overview, Fellow Information, etc, were maintained in chronology nonetheless; however, the proposal is best absorbed if read whole as a story.

Student Information:

The structure of the nonfiction is a depiction of me trying to respond to an essay prompt in which I estimated the budget of my student proposal to be 1500 dollars and the deep thought process that gave to the entirety of the story. In the story, I immersed myself in the backdrop of the problems I am trying to solve in my community starting with the backward traditional beliefs and practices rife in my community. I was careful to bring to life in the story the many mixed feelings, thoughts and inquisitions about the clash between primitive religious and traditional culture with the order of modern scientific reasoning and rationale I have.

Secondly, is the scenario of poor health and welfare which I captured with ‘’Because backwardness breeds madness’’, taking care to emanate the raw form or context of the plight of the people in my community

Applying the wealth of experience and morals from the GCYA, I concluded by successfully slating an agenda to curb these problems, encapsulated in the very title ‘‘Promoting Enlightenment and Health Resolution in my Community’’.

Problem/Need/Situation Description:

1.

‘‘Essay prompt: If you were awarded $1500 for a community service project to help your community, what issue would you address? Who would benefit and how? How would you measure the success of the activity? Note this should not be considered as an opportunity to request funds.’’

Victor was at it again, under the beams of the kerosene lamp, ruminating on the Global Citizen Year Academy Social impact proposal prompt that has put his introvertedly thoughtful and environmentally conscious personality to the test over the past week spent grappling with what to write. Were his friends right by calling his personality a weak White-people material? Should a village-bred Igbo boy like him be pursuing opportunities for social impact and change-making like this?

Even then his only friends were made of paper and ink. Back in primary school, he learned to read and write long before the other children. Where his classmates saw notches of ink on incomprehensible pages, he saw light, streets, and people. Words and the mystery of their hidden science fascinated him and he saw in them a key with which he could unlock a boundless world, a haven from his current reality: those troubled days in which he felt like a stranger, if not a foreigner, in his home.

Did he not learn any lesson from the beatings his father gave him for repeatedly disobeying him, for choosing his passion for reading books and erudition over his father’s will to carry on the family’s fanatism with the African traditional culture and norms?

No, he was too inquisitive to have been destined to be ‘‘Black people material’’. He questioned almost every illogical, abnormal and harmful aspect of Igbo culture since childhood, from the dramatic storytelling under full moonlight to the annual new yam festival that celebrated an ordinary tuber crop; Why the female gender was second-place in Igbo hierarchy or entirely out of the picture in most events like property inheritance? Why spider webs at the corners of a house are interpreted as a sign of spiritual attack by one’s enemies rather than the natural habitat of spiders? Why bush baby, which logically is a nocturnal animal possessing natural adaptive characters, is interpreted as some doe-eyed female human-like evil spirit with long entangling breasts and a tail? Why barrenness is interpreted as the product of some evil spell or curse tracing the matrilineal lineage of the household? Why Atuere/Ukwu agba shoe are believed to be invoked mischiefs or deprecations by sadists; meanwhile, are diseases like elephantiasis and measles that can be prevented and treated? Why Igbo mythology crave ‘Arusi’, spirits and deities, or worse still, worship inanimate objects, attributing infinite godliness and glorious life to the lifeless? Why people were deemed the property of the gods, Osu, and completely forbidden from interactions and relationships whatsoever?

‘‘Is it just human nature to search for the source of the sophistication of the human species by reconciling it with an almighty ‘god factor’ and greater supernatural beings? Or is the origin and function of religion tailored to serve as the opium of the masses, somewhat, a check and balance on the pliable and unpredictable character of man?’’ He often wondered.

‘‘Does appealing to an immaterial world avoid certain important questions that deserve answers? It is no longer heresy that we are in fact physical beings, that our brains are the source of mental life: our emotions, decision-making, passions, pains, and everything else we perceive outside of ourselves. So, for the sake of conventional and conservative societal traditions and culture, must we continue to take the literature and proponents of Academia with a pinch of salt? Is it not the big picture to migrate from the Dark Ages to the Age of Reason and Enlightenment?

Biologists and psychologists would be quick to point as evidence that damage to the brain can have profound effects on who we are. Examples ranging from the historical case study of Phineas Gage whose character and disposition were completely transformed by his head injury, diseases like syphilis that disrupt the will of consciousness, Alzheimer’s that rob you of your rationality, to coffee and alcohol that inflame desires. Offshoots of the so-called almighty ‘Astonishing Hypothesis’.

Are these evidence that physical events that affect the brain can affect us or some theatrical science fiction attempting to animate the mundane nature of science? Our joys, sorrows, beliefs, memories, ambitions, love, romance, sense of personal identity and free will, in fact, no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules?

On second thoughts, could this be the secret of miracles, the unaccountable? A manipulation of undiscovered and convoluted dimensions in sciences by greater powers? Are we faithful followers and believers in religion because we have failed to traverse 'out-of-bounds?’’

Intended Outcomes/Impact of Activities

Nevertheless, immersed in this conflict between logic and religion, between the rational principles behind his traditional upbringing and evolutionary message of the outside modern world of the 21st century, there was so much out of place and backward to have allowed enough room for his young mind to develop into the forward-thinking mindset and his passion into an agenda to right the false and faulty cultural beliefs, paradigm and religious doctrines in his community. He has written a short story titled ‘‘Anomaly’’:

(https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NU446MBcoImAqNVZ4G3bov2y1EhDClFm/view?usp=sharing) to address the debilitating and backward nature of the African traditional beliefs in his community, and looks forward to mobilizing massive enlightenment programs to educate his community right and creating awareness of the demotional and regressive impact of these practices.

‘‘What a life journey…. ’’ he said to himself. ‘‘It is a wonder how backwardness can breed madness.’’

And then it hit him: Eureka!

‘’Because backwardness breeds madness’’; the perfect theme for his GCYA social impact proposal he thought. After much research, scribbling down outlines and running through multiple drafts, he was able to write:

**

2.

BECAUSE BACKWARDNESS BREEDS MADNESS

If I invited you to join my daily commute down the roads in Aba North area or took you on a stroll just past my residential street within the local community, we might walk into the cluster of mothers/widows who regularly seat by Faulks road, under the shade of umbrellas, cradling and breastfeeding their skinny babies while begging for public support.

We might equally walk into a mob of protesting youths marching towards the Aba North Local Government Headquarters and shaking the earth with each march and clamour for a premium educational system and a definite stop to the agelong strike actions by public universities in Nigeria over the poorly funded Nigerian educational sector:

Resume Schools! End the University strikes!

Within a kilometre drive in commute, you would be shocked to have counted a good number of fatal health cases of wound infection, hernia, tumours, and metastasized cancers. The victims of these public health crises would be lying by the roadside or loitering in the traffic, begging for aid; before long, you might equally sight cases of malnourishment and Kwashiorkor in children, orphans, and vagrants whose feet and bodies would be heavy from a long day of toil, of begging for at least a day's meal.

Those hawking biscuits, sweets, and soft drinks would usually dash out of the traffic when the raging violent scene from irritated drivers and bus conductors whose bottled-up frustrations from the poor standard of living overflow and turn accusatory glares and insults at each other into fistful confrontation and brutal martial combat with broken bottles and the likes.

You might get used to driving past the good number of mentally ill people who must have dissociated from the burdens of maintaining a life that was too heavy for them to carry. Don’t mistake the dread looks of hopelessness on their overly crumpled faces and their condition as some punishment for their incompetence at working hard to overcome the challenges of life, or pass the same judgement when we might witness the common scenario where apprehended thieves are publicly mutilated and burnt on the street, whatever the case may be. They are humans, we all are, nonetheless. When we come to the end of the commute/stroll, please do not be too quick to call them beggars, mad, mentally deranged, criminals, ghetto people, street children, or as much as call my community a mess, because I couldn’t be prouder to be of them, by them, and for them. If you took a closer look, you would notice that we are farmers, tailors, lawyers, engineers, teachers, doctors, nurses, carpenters, electricians, traders, or husbands/fathers, wives/mothers, families, promising social units, but also victims of a backward public welfare and health system.

Intended Outcomes/Impact of Activities

My closest encounter with madness was on the multiple occasions my father beat me to a stupor over my love for books. The experience may not completely capture the definition of madness, but the immense pain I endured over something that should be normal redefined my perspective of madness. Deep down, I knew my father’s intentions for me were for good. He was a victim of the backward village fetishes that forced irrational impulses and aggressive actions on him, his mentality clouded and sight blinded to the fact that his son, my wounded twelve-year-old self he desperately tried to shape into a property of the gods, yearned for resolution.

In the same light, it matters that the widows by the roadside can easily displace touch with reality, suffering from the great depression; that the protesters, greatly aggrieved by the high cost of living, marched the streets protesting. it equally matters that the homeless children in the traffic and so-called criminals are potentially active workforce for the community whose inborn talents and skills are being lost to the ugly fate of street life and unemployment, that the mentally ill people must have suffered from unimaginable hardship/want and lost consciousness of sense and self. It matters more that they too need resolution.

Work Plan/Specific Activities & Budget

Therefore, BECAUSE BACKWARDNESS BREEDS MADNESS, if I were endorsed with $1500 for a community service project, I would organize ‘‘The People’s Resolution’’, a project to promote better general health and living conditions in my community, I will work in collaboration with the Medical Research and Humanitarian Society (MEDRHUS)

(see: https://days-in-thelife.blogspot.com/2022/10/me-at-medical-outreach-at-umuabi-udi.html) in my university, employing and deploying the voluntary expertise of her experienced activist, humanists, doctors, fellow visionary members and social impact volunteers from my community. Together, we will launch a massive public enlightenment program to reorient harmful indigenous traditions and unhealthy lifestyles, utilizing various means of publication: social media platforms, written and published articles (see my work: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CAuUuSP2iaD4dCy18bJUWzWmgi4lILx-/view?usp=sharing), books or magazines, open tutorial sessions on the streets, in schools or churches. To promote interest in education, scholarship incentives will be awarded to high-performing students in the tertiary, secondary, and primary levels who meet the necessary criteria of assessment including best performance in national exams like JAMB and WASSCE. Also, funds will be dedicated to supporting the education of promising less-privileged students, enrolling and accommodating homeless children in foster/motherless baby home care. Community medical outreaches and disbursement of basic health kits, infant immunization, free drugs, and clinical health tests. This will be achieved by the dual collaboration of associations on my university campus I consider my agency like the Medical Research and Humanitarian Society (MEDRHUS) and Youth Health Action Network (YOHAN). My affiliations with professional medical bodies and social work organizations will enable me to mobilize voluntary services committed to empowering youths in my community through skill acquisition sessions, igniting passion, dreams, and will, and starting up livelihoods for the working class.

Evaluation

At this juncture, only the people would be able to legitimately measure the success of our community service. Only the many lives improved and empowered would attest to how valuable, life-changing, and impactful our activity and sacrifices have been. Better still, we would publicize their success stories to reflect the success of our project and attract domestic and international generous donations to sustain its operation.